Increasing

Rust's Reach

About

Increasing Rust's Reach is one of several programs run by the Rust Programming Language Team to grow Rust's community of project collaborators and leaders.

This program matches Rust team members from all parts of the project with individuals who are underrepresented in Rust's community and the tech industry for a partnership of three (3) months, from mid-May to mid-August. Each partnership agrees to a commitment of 3–5 hours per week working on a Rust Project.

Unlike a traditional mentor/mentee relationship, we refer to groups of folks in the program as Partners, reinforcing the fact that we believe the project has an equal amount to learn from participants as they have to learn from us. A typical week will include a 1 hr meeting with your Rust partner, a 1 hr weekly sharing meeting with the larger group of program participants, and a few hours of pairing or independent work on your specific project.

By way of thanks for participating in the program, we offer a fully paid conference ticket, travel, and accomodations for every participant to a Rust Conference of their choice:

Timeline

2018 Projects

Here are the projects that we've organized for the 2018 program.

WebAssembly

WebAssembly("wasm") is a web standard that allows developers to run binary code in the browser.
The Rust team is excited to make Rust a first class language for writing this type of code, and
has chosen WASM as one the four key domains in which we'd like to ship a first class developer
experience this year.

Great candidates for this project will be excited about learning more about wasm, writing documentation for others after having experimented with new tools for wasm, and a willingness to grapple with a new frontier of computing where more often than not we're drawing the map for others. They'll be working on writing tutorials for new tools so that others can learn how to use them, provide fixes/features for those tools, and work with the wasm-wg to provide a better experience for the ecosystem as a whole.

Michael Gattozzi

rust-lang.org Design

rust-lang.org is the online home of the Rust Programming Language and often the first impression new folks get of the project and community. We're planning on shipping a brand new design with lots of new content this year.

Great candidates for this project will be excited to learn about all the aspects of shipping a large website with multiple stakeholders in opensource. We'll be writing mobile-friendly accessible HTML and CSS, wrangling content (and content stakeholders), and running a bunch of design reviews and QA sessions to prepare the site for launch in August!

Lee Baillie herds Rubies and wrangles JavaScripts at Tilde in Portland, OR, mainly in the context of building Skylight, a Rails performance profiler. In their spare time, they enjoy hanging out with their dog JPEG, exploring the beautiful outdoors of the PNW, and lifting heavy things only to put them down again. Lee has spoken at several Rust confs and is a member of the Rust Website Team. Lee was a participant in Increasing Rust's Reach 2017 and is excited to be back as a Partner this year!

Lee Baillie

rust-lang.org Internationalization

rust-lang.org is the online home of the Rust Programming Language and often the first impression new folks get of the project and community. We're planning on shipping a brand new site this year and want to implement Mozilla's Pontoon internationalization framework to leverage Mozilla's huge community of translators.

Great candidates for this project will be excited to learn about i10n best practices, and specifically the Mozilla Pontoon framework. Candidates will work to implement the framework on the new website as well as work to develop, manage, and maintain a community of translators for the new site.

Ashley Williams

Embedded

Rust has the potential to make programming resource-constrained devices much more productive—and fun! We want embedded programming to reach first-class status this year.

This year, we will be developing new Continuous Integration (CI) tests for embedded platforms to detect when changes in the compiler would negatively affect embedded Rust devices. These tests will be added to the Rust Language test infrastructure as a critical part of Rust's commitment to stability.

Participants should be excited to learn more about Continuous Integration testing, EmbeddedMicrocontroller Systems, Static Analysis of programs, and virtualized testing using tools like QEMU. Participants will get to play a major part in this working group's efforts: learning about the current Rust Language test infrastructure, developing new tests, and getting the tests merged upstream.

James Munns

Diesel

Diesel is a Safe, Extensible ORM and Query Builder for Rust. It considers itself the most productive way to interact with databases in Rust because of its safe and composable abstractions over queries.

Good candidates for this project will be interested in how database interfaces work, both in the context of web apps, as well as in other domains. Diesel is a library that is often used by people who are entirely new to Rust, and we want to ensure that we have the greatest expierience possible for that group of people. Candidates will have the opportunity to work closely with the Diesel team, both to improve documentation and find missing APIs to improve the experience for those who are new to the language.

Sean is the creator of the Diesel Framework. He is also a committer on Rails and has worked extensively as a Ruby developer, notably on Active Record, in addition to his work on and with Rust.

Sean Griffin

Command line interfaces(CLI)

Rust makes writing crossplatform, tested, modern command line applications frictionless while incorporating industry best practices and providing great documentation. We want to make this experience even better this year.

Good candidates for this project will be interested in command line interface applications. Participants will get to contribute to this working group's efforts. We are trying to make writing command line applications in Rust a beginner-friendly and frictionless experience. For this, we want to write new entry-level guides, and create new libraries, e.g. tools for building cross platform terminal colours or for accessing file system APIs.

Aaron Power

clap-rs

clap is a fast and configurable argument parsing library for Rust. It is the de-facto standard in the crates ecosystem for handling provided arguments when creating commandline applications.

Candidates for this project should bring an interest and fascination with the building of commandline interfaces and UX design. They will dive deep into the process of creating CLIs, avoiding common performance and stability pitfalls and creating maintanable and easily distributable tools.

Kevin is the creator of clap and a member of the CLI Working Group. He is fascinated by all things command line and passionate about building, and teaching others how to build a command line world with better UX and more consistency.

Kevin Knapp

Testimonials

Here are some words from prior partners and participants!

I learned a lot about Rust and I also learned that the Rust community is great, it's really welcoming and friendly. And I also discovered that there's a lot more that I want to learn about Rust." Listen more...

- Anna Liao, 2017 Participant

The coolest thing about the trip [to RustFest Zurich] was meeting a bunch of other people in the [Increasing Rust's Reach] program... It was really cool that the program helped me have a built-in group of pals who I felt really comfortable with immediately." Listen more...

- Lee Baillie, 2017 Participant

[T]he Increasing Rust’s Reach program ended up being one of the best projects to help further my programming skills." Read more...

- Ryan Blecher, 2017 Participant

[The best part of learning Rust in the Rust Reach Program] was the community... I learned a ton just from having discussions and calls with my Rust partners, which would have maybe taken ages if I had tried to go learn on my own." Listen more...

- Matt Gathu, 2017 Participant

Organizers

This program is an official program of the Rust Programming Language and is supported fully by the Rust Teams. To learn more about the Rust Programming Language, visit the website.